EMAF is regarded internationally as one of the most influential forums for contemporary media art. Each year it offers its visitors an overview of current artistic productions in film programmes, exhibitions, performances and hybrid formats. Guest-curated projects and retrospectives provide in-depth insights into historical positions and contexts.
The festival identifies as a place of experimentation, where extraordinary works are created and actors from different fields can enter into dialogue with each other. Each year, around 12.000 international artists, curators, researchers, students and film and art lovers meet at EMAF.
In its programme, EMAF not only provides an annual overview of contemporary media art but also addresses developments and discourses that shape our social co-existence, be they of an artistic, technological or political nature. This process of critical engagement is particularly evident in the festival theme, which is developed by a curatorial team that changes every year. With the upcoming thematic focus Witnessing Witnessing, we intend to explore the role of witnesses today, how testimonies – like statements, documents, individual objects or entire archives – shape our view of the world and how they can influence political reality.
What we witness or hand down as a testimony enables others to form a picture of the world that goes beyond the limits of their own experience. Witnessing thus creates connections between individual and collective, past and present realms of experience. Testimonies are also important because they have the potential to bring into play voices that were previously unheard. They can challenge the transmission of inherited knowledge, but also unconscious processes of social repression, and thus permanently change what can be said, perceived and imagined. But what happens when these processes are interrupted? When testimonies are ignored, actively denied or used against the witnesses themselves? And how is it possible to mediate between different or contradictory accounts of reality?
The exhibition, curated by Inga Seidler, conceives of witnessing as an active and performative practice that goes far beyond the mere documentation of events. Artists use digital media, video, film and interactive installations to explore witnessing as a moral, political and emotional act. They question the authenticity and truth of media production by examining the responsibilities and power relations involved in representing events, history, trauma and violence. Visitors are invited to investigate for themselves, make connections and critically engage with the information presented, thus becoming part of the processual act of witnessing.
What can art and cinema do, or say, in times of a live-streamed genocide committed with impunity? The film programme, curated by Laura Huertas Millán, examines a range of artistic practices that explore memory, the physicality of resistance, and performance as a somatic archive for the transmission of History. The title of the series, We Sing to Wing Again, inspired by a verse by the poet Hoa Nguyen, reflects an attunement to the never-ending cycles of colonial violence, the breaking of oppressive silence, bearing witness, and sheltering hope.
When witnesses of violence and injustice are hushed up in their testimony, where is what happened registered, where is it accounted for? I could swear my face was touching stone, the title of this year’s Talks curated by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marc Siegel, Philip Widmann and Florian Wüst, is borrowed from the poem Land to Light On (1997) by Canadian author Dionne Brand. In her poetry, Brand has repeatedly turned to the question of bearing witness, to the gap between what has been done and its recounting. The four hybrid events that combine panels, lectures, readings and films attend to the transhistorical dimension of affective witnessing as well as to corporeal and sensory forms of knowledge.
The 38th European Media Art Festival will take place from April 23rd to 27th, 2025. The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück will be on view until May 25, 2025.